Russian Prosecutors threaten to block Reform.news over controversial content

The Russ­ian watch­dog Roskom­nad­zor has sent a warn­ing to the edi­tors of Reform.news that the site will be blocked for Russ­ian users in 24 hours unless all infor­ma­tion on it is removed.

Pho­to: reform.news

“In response to the Pros­e­cu­tor Gen­er­al of Rus­sia or Pros­e­cu­tor Gen­er­al deputy’s request to restrict access to infor­ma­tion resources (No. 27–31-2024/Treb803-24, 02.08.2024), we are issu­ing a notice of vio­la­tion for infor­ma­tion post­ed at the fol­low­ing URLs: https://reform.news,” Reform.news edi­to­r­i­al staff quotes the mes­sage received. The edi­tors learned of Roskom­nad­zor’s deci­sion on the evening of August 19.

The media out­let team has no inten­tion of remov­ing the con­tent in ques­tion. They point out that this is not the first instance of Reform.news being blocked. Fol­low­ing the com­mence­ment of Russia’s com­pre­hen­sive mil­i­tary oper­a­tion in Ukraine, the domain was sim­i­lar­ly restrict­ed in accor­dance with the deci­sion of the Pros­e­cu­tor General’s Office of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, dat­ed March 30, 2022.

Reform.news edi­tors are also aware that Roskom­nad­zor has com­piled a spe­cial dossier on them. It con­tains infor­ma­tion from open sources and spec­i­fies the start date, top­ics, accounts on social net­works, and the com­po­si­tion of the man­age­ment. It is also not­ed that the out­let gained pop­u­lar­i­ty after the protests in Belarus in 2020–2021.

In August 2021, the Reform.by project’s web­site was blocked in Belarus. On March 15 of this year, the Exec­u­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter ordered the can­cel­la­tion of the Reform.by domain name. The arti­cles are now post­ed on the web­site with a new domain, reform.news. This site is also blocked in Belarus, but it is acces­si­ble via VPN. The web­site, YouTube chan­nel, and sev­er­al pages of the media project on social media have been des­ig­nat­ed as “extrem­ist infor­ma­tion prod­ucts.”